But moving into the contemporary moment, I think it's really important to kind of look at white paper, the Indian control of Indian education document as highlighting some of that transition. So residential schools were starting to be phased out like I said, the last one closed in 96. But they were certainly being phased out at this point. The integration thing, while that was happening there was also some other movements happening in communities and in, in, in the cities too, I should give full, credit to the cities for developing some of these programs too. To restore language and culture. And so you see a, an Indian survival school movement where some people would just, they would reclaim schools and like physical building space and introduce language and culture as an important part of the curriculum that was going on there. Or they would demand that in, in their local schools, and sometimes it was extra Curricular. So a half hour of language before and after school. But there were these movements happening. And you can see, it's a kind of a direct relation to residential schools which is about loss of language and culture, they're trying to bring that into these schools. But they're still using schools. And that's one of the interesting kind of carryovers from, from here is that a lot of what kind of characterizes the aboriginal education today is happening in a school envrironment. So the physical space of learning continues to be schools. In the majority of communities. There were movements to kind of change residential school buildings. And some cases, you know, what communities felt was best was just to completely demolish the thing becuase it just, you know, it's a memory of everything that happened there, right? And so just to destroy it was what some people wanted. In some other places they transferred that into the opposite of what happened there before. So these places. Where you could come and learn languages and culture. I think Blue Quills is an example. It's a college for, you know, Indian learning and language and culture and all kinds of different skills that enable you to kind of see in two ways. Two way seeing, I'll use that, to borrow a term from the Mikmaq. But there's an example in. In the Mohawk community in southern Quebec. Where they just sort of marched in and took over the school. And said this, this is now going to be a school that teaches us how to survive as Mohawk. So there were these elements for survival school. That's, so that's certainly a theme and a trend that's happening. But the two way it g/ seeing is another one I want to talk about. Which kind of reminds me of, what was the best possible opportunity or scenario that could have come out of this early contact period? Where people could learn to have strong Have indigenous identities but participate in a society like the one we have now. And so there are a number of places that are doing that kind of, that's what they're striving to achieve. Is that you learn the provincial curriculum. You are able to participate in all the institutions of, of Canada, US but you have a strong sense of who you are and your identity. The language and culture being a part of that. One of the, The things that's a bit of a challenge, though, with introducing language into a school environment; When it becomes a subject of instruction rather than like the medium of instruction and everyone is using it. It doesn't really take hold. It kind of has to be learned in the home and a movement that is addressing that kind of comes from the Mallory people. They're doing the language nests, where they Kind of created these spaces where once you enter in all interaction is in the indigenous language. The parents are involved. It's not just like the, the kids are learning it from teachers, but it's, it's happening in that space where the, kind of happened that the kids were learning it and the parrents were kind of like I want to learn that too. [laugh] Or just to see that kind of, there's a notion of pride in it. So it's kind of Carried through all the way to tertiary education in New Zealand where the generations that learn the language and the language [unknown] kept demanding and the parents and the communities kept demanding opportunites to continue learning in the language at each level as they went up. And so now I think it's possible for them to do that. There's a great school in Hawaii too where they have 100% graduation rate and they're graduating with knoledge of language and ceremony and culture. It's quite a remarkable success sotry. I can't gthink of. You have other schools that have, have anywhere like above an 80% graduation rate. So, kind of some remarkable trends happening. Some of the schools that are in the communities are able to offer instruction in the, in the language up to grades 4 or 6, it's changing. A challenge though is recognition of community people with accreditation that's recognized by Colleges of teachers and so forth. So that's, that's something again that you know, every time we take stock of indian control of indian education and we think of what are the different kinds of control that are, are part of this indian controlled education. Have we had some movement on curriculum? A little bit. Perhaps. Not always enough. Because there's, you know, even in the. You see, another trend I have to share with you is the notion of education authorities, which kind of act as Kind of a school board on a national level, national meaning like a first nation level. So the Mikmaq were kind of the first in Canada to have this separate kind of authority over a number of community schools where they could run them in their own way. And there was a provision there because it kind of, it required two pieces of legislation. First, Canada has to sort of say we're restoring that jurisdiction back to the first nation over education. Education, because, Indian education is a federal responsibility under the Constitution. So, they have to kind of legislate first of all or handing over authority, which unfortunate the way I said that just now, and the province has to also recognize that education will be run by the First Nation in this local area. So it's kind of about recognizing that authority. Now, what's happened in those pieces of legislation for the [unknown] and then BC has followed it This model. And soon the Nishnawbic nation will have something like this in Ontario. In each of these areas the provinces required this, this clause. Which is transfer without penalty clause. So supposedly at any stage, any age, any grade level. The student can leave the first nation education system and enter into the provincial education system. And not have to change levels. So like if you leave grade six there, you can go into grade six in the province. What this effectively does, without saying it, is require the First Nation schools to do, to maintain provincial curriculum. Because how else are they going to transfer if they don't have the, the knowledge. Now, many people point out that the parents and the communities largely want their children to have those provincial skills. But it also ties the hands of people who would really like to integrate indigenous learning that kind of looks like this into those models. Because that takes a lot of time too. How do you do both? Both and, and still meet that transfer without penalty clause. So, that's a challenge to think that first nations controled educations system are going to halfta grapple with in the coming years as, as more of us adopt that kind of education board or authority that first nations can join and say "We're part of this education system. And, and we're delivering things the way we want to do it", but ultimately behold into provincial curriculum. Another one of those indian controls though is, is over Finances and, again, education being a federal responsibility, Canada is the one who provides the funding for it. And, as it's been pointed out you know, time and time again by auditors [unknown] it's inadequate, it's not meeting the same per capita funding as [unknown] schools do for Canadian citizens. So there's been a [unknown] under-funding for Indian students in that system, And less people think that a lot of that funding is going to the communities, a lot of it is going to the administration which continues to be you know, mostly the government the federal government. And then below that a lot is for the personel, most of whom are non-native. So Canadian tax payers are actually funding their fellow Canadians for most of this. It's not really even going to indigenous communities. You know, the, Diane Longboat looked at the situation in the 1980's and kind of said, you know, we don't really have Indian control of Indian education. We have Indian control over administration. Cause a lot of the stuff is downloaded and kind of, here's the amount that you're going to get. Now you distribute it. But they still had to get approvals for personnel and for hiring and so forth from Indian Affairs. So that control isn't really there.
